Fire Safety of Passenger Trains; Phase II: Application of Fire Hazard Analysis Techniques

摘要

Fire safety is an area of particular interest for both conventional intercity passenger and commuter rail trains, and new, lightweight high-speed trains. A systems approach to fire safety can address passenger rail car design and materials, detection and suppression, passenger and train crew evacuation, and their interactions. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is sponsoring a multi-phase research program directed at providing the scientific basis for using a systems approach to evaluate the level of passenger train fire safety already achieved through the current prescriptive material requirements. A recently published interim report documents the results of Phase I of the research program being conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [1]. That first phase focused on the evaluation of passenger rail car interior furnishing materials, using data from FRA-cited small-scale test methods and from an alternative test method using the Cone Calorimeter (American Society for Testing and Materials) [ASTM] E-1354 [2]. This interim report presents the results of Phase II. Heat release rate (HRR) and other measurements were used as an input to a computer fire model. Hazard analyses were conducted for three typical passenger rail car configurations to evaluate the contribution of selected materials to overall passenger train fire safety. These analyses used data from the Cone Calorimeter tests conducted in Phase I and data from representative passenger rail car interior component assembly tests using a large-scale Furniture Calorimeter. Currently, the U.S. and European approaches to passenger train fire safety rely primarily on individual small-scale test methods to evaluate material fire performance. However, a 1993 FRA-sponsored study by NIST concluded that an alternative approach could provide a more credible and cost-effective means to predict the fire performance of passenger train materials [3]. This alternative approach employs fire hazard assessment techniques, using fire modeling based on test methods using HRR data. An extensive effort sponsored by the European Railway Research Institute (ERR) is also underway to relate small-scale and real-scale fire performance, using HRR and fire modeling [4].